Keynote Speakers

Dissecting Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

Prof. Michelle ARKIN

Prof. Michelle ARKIN

Michelle is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco and an Adjunct Professor at the Buck Institute of Research on Aging. Her lab focuses on developing first-in-class chemical probes and drug leads for novel therapeutic targets in age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and cancer. Michelle co-directs the UCSF Small Molecule Discovery Center (SMDC) and frequently collaborates with biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Several startup companies have grown out of work done at the SMDC. Michelle is the President of Board of Directors the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium, a member of the Board of Directors for the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), and a member of the Editorial board of the Assay Guidance Manual and Current Protocols in Chemical Biology. She represents UCSF in the National Cancer Institute’s Chemical Biology Consortium and the Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) consortium. Before UCSF, Michelle was the Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover and develop inhibitors of protein-protein interactions, including IL-2/IL-2R, and LFA1/ICAM (lifitigrast).

Prof. Brent NANNENGA

Prof. Brent NANNENGA

Brent Nannenga is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering in the School for Engineering Matter, Transport and Energy at Arizona State University and a member of The Biodesign Institute’s Center for Applied Structural Discovery. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington in 2011 under the supervision of François Baneyx. Following his graduate studies, he conducted postdoctoral research at Janelia Research Campus (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) in the lab of Tamir Gonen, where he focused on the development and application of microcrystal electron diffraction (MicroED). Since joining Arizona State University in 2015, his research has focused on the continued development of MicroED, as well as using structure determination to engineer biomolecules and materials with novel and unique properties.

Prof. Patrick GRIFFIN

Dr Reto HORST

Dr Reto HORST

Dr. Reto Horst is a Principal Scientist in the Structural and Molecular Sciences group at Pfizer in Groton, CT. He is developing and applying cutting edge NMR methods to identify and validate hits from various screening funnels and to characterize protein–ligand interactions. Dr. Horst has guided fragment-based drug discovery efforts in various disease areas and made key contributions to several discovery projects. Dr. Horst obtained a diploma (MSc) in Physics and a PhD in Biophysics under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Dr. Kurt Wuthrich at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. Before joining Pfizer in 2012, he was a Staff Scientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA, where his research was focused on studying GPCR signalling pathways and chaperonin-assisted protein folding by solution state NMR spectroscopy, resulting in more than 30 peer-reviewed publications that appeared in Tier 1 journals including Cell, Science and PNAS.